The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1887-09-29
TALMAGE'S SERMON.
'Woman's Opportunity ''--Though
Suggested By It's Study.
The Home the Realm Wherein She
Reigns-Musculine Women and
Effeminate Men Discussed in
Their Domestic Relations.

tons'' "Woman's Opportunity" his text
being:
So God created man in his own image, in the |
Image OF God created he him; male and female |
created he them.-Genesis L. q.
In other words, God, who can make no |
mistake, made man and woman for q spe- |
cific work, and to move in particular |
to be regnant in his realm, |
to be dominant in hers. The bound |
airy line between Italy and Switzerland, |
between England and Scotland, is not
more thoroughly marked than this dis
tinction between the empire masculine and
the empire feminine. So entirely dissim-
liar are the fields to which God called them
that you can no more compare them than
you can oxygen and hydrogen, water and
grass, trees and stars. All this talk about
the superiority of one sex to the other sex
is an everlasting waste of ink and speech.
A jeweler may have q scale so delicate
that he can weigh the dust of diamonds,
but where are the scales sodelicate thatyou
can weigh them in affection against affec-
toin, sentiment against sentiment, thought
against thought, soul against soul, mans
world against a woman's world! You
come out with your stereotyped remark,
the man is superior to woman in intellect;
and then open on my desk the swarthy,
iron-typed, thunder bolted writings of
Harriet Martneau, and Elizabeth Brown
ing, and George Eliot. You come on
with your. stereotyped remark about
woman's superiority to man in the item OF
affection, but ask you where was there
more capacity to love than in John, the
disciple, and Robert McCheyne, the
Scotchman, and John Summerield, the
Methodist, and Henry Martin, the mis-
sionary.z The hearts of those men were so
large, that after you had rolled
into them two hemispheres, there
was room still left to marshal
the hosts of Heaven and set up the throne
of the eternal Jehovah. I deny to man
the throne intellectual. I deny to woman
the throne affectional. No human phrase
ology will ever define the spheres, while
there is an intuition by which we know
when a man is in his realm, and when
woman is in her realm, and when either OF
them is out of it. No bungling legislature
ought to attempt to make definition or
to say: "This is the line and that is the
line"
MY theory is that if woman wants to
vote she ought to vote, and that if man
wants to embroider and keep house he
ought to be allowed to embroider and keep
house. There are masculine women and
effeminate men. My theory is that you
have no right to interfere with any ones
doing any thing that is righteous. Al
bany and Washington might as well de-
cree by legislation how high brown
thrasher should fly, or how deep trout
should swim, as to try to seek out the
height or the depth of a woman's
duty. The question of capacity
will settle finally the whole ques-
ton. the whole subject. When a
woman is prepared to preach, she will
preach, and neither conference nor presby.
terry can hinder her. When a woman is
prepared to move in highest commercial
spheres she will have great influence on
the exchange, and no boards of trade can
hinder her. want woman to understand
that heart and brain can overly any bar
rier that politicians may set up, and that
nothing can keep her back or keep hel
down but the question of incapacity.
There are women, know, of most undo.
sirable nature, who wander up and down
the CONTEMPLATING no homes OF theil
own, or forsaking their own homes-talk.
ing about their rights, and we know very
well that they themselves are fit neither
to vote nor to keep house. Their mission
seems to be to humiliate the two sexes al
the thought of what any of us might be.
come. No one would want to live under
the laws that such women would enact, OF
4. to have cast upon society the children
that such a woman would raise. But
shall show you this morning that the bes'
rights that woman can own she al
ready has in her possession; that her posi-
tion in this country at this time is not ons
of commiseration, but one of congratula-
ton; that the grandeur and power of hel
realm have never yet been appreciated
that she sits to-day on a throne so higl
that all the thrones of earth piled on toI
of each other would not make for her {
footstool. Here is the platform on which
she stands. Away down below 1T are thu
ballot-box and the congressional as
semblage and the legislative hall. WomeI
always have voted and always will vote
Our great-grandfathers thought they wer,
by their votes putting Washington into
the presidential chair. No. His mother
by the principles she taught him, and by
the habits she inculcated made him Presi
dent. It wasa Christian mothers hant
dropping the ballot when Lord Bacol
wrote, and Newton philosophical
and Alfred the Great governed
and Jonathan Edwards Numbered o
Judgment to come. How many men Their
have been in high political station VIII,
would have been insufficient to stand tn,
test to which their moral principle was pu
had it not been for wife's voice that en-
couraged them to do right, and Wife
prayer that sounded louder than tn
clamor of partisanship? Why, my friends
the right Of suffrage, as we men exercis
it, seems to be feeble thing. You,
Christian man, come up to the ballot-bo1
and you drop your vote. Right after yo'
comes libertine, or sot-the ofscourin,
of the street-and he drops his vote; ant
his vote counteracts yours. But if in tn
quiet of home life daughter by he
Christian demeanor, a wife by her in
dustry, mother by her faithfulness, cast
vote in the right direction, then nothing
can resist it, and the influence of that vot
will thr oh through the eternities.
My chief anxiety then, is not that won
an have other rights accorded her, bu
that she, by the grace of God, rise up t
the appreciation of the glorious rights sh
already possesses. This incoming I shall
only have time to speak of o ne grand an,
all-absorbing right that every woman has
and that is To make home hapDy. Tha